“I have no regrets: If I hadn’t joined the National Guard, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” said former service member Nicole Olson. After 18 months trying the college route, she enlisted in the Iowa National Guard as a preventive medicine specialist in 2008. “My job in the military led me to the environmental world” she said, when describing how she discovered her current position. “I didn’t even know it was here. I discovered the passion I have for it.”

A defense contractor has agreed to pay $9.1 million to settle claims that it furnished U.S. service members with earplugs that it knew were defective, the Department of Justice announced on Thursday. The settlement suggests that pure greed may be partly to blame for the military's "silent epidemic" of hearing loss.